In this eclectic collection of eleven short stories, author Ruth Ozeki begins with the title story, “The Typing Lady,” which is coyly disguised as “An Author’s Note.” In metafictional fashion, Ozeki is both commenting on the book she has written and the experience of reading and writing fiction.
The narrator notices a “typing lady” – “Asian-looking, with black-framed glasses and gray-streaked hair” – working on a laptop in a public library. Something about the woman piques her curiosity. Two years later, the narrator learns of a new book of short fiction by someone who looks like the typing lady.
After attending a public reading of the book, the narrator goes on to observe: “But this author’s note is not really about [her] stories. It’s about yours and mine, about how, when we read a story, we bring our own lives to bear on it and make it ours, no matter what the writer might have intended. Stories are like that. They are collaborations between people who read and people who type. They are how we co-create each other and dream ourselves into being.”
Ruth Ozeki is author of a memoir and four novels, including My Year of Meats and A Tale of Time Being which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize. She also is a filmmaker and a Zen Buddhist priest.
In Typing Lady, she presents an intriguing variety of settings and characters. “The Problem of the Body” features an elderly novelist and her granddaughter, age 17. On a lark, the old woman creates a fake profile, impersonating a teen-age girl, on a dating app with unexpected results. “Ships in the Night” follows down-and-out young people in an inner-city Vancouver scape populated by drug dealers, prostitutes and homeless people. “The Anthropologist’s Kid” tells the story of two children of white Yale academics and Asian moms. They become best friends then abruptly part ways after a shocking incident.
Writing and writers are central topics in several of the stories. In “One Art,” a college student falls in love with her English professor, and these deep feelings, exquisitely rendered by Ozeki, are inextricably linked with the student’s own writing.
“That spring I fell in love with you, I also fell in love with my work – with writing, with language – and ever since, those feelings have been fused. Opening my heart to you opened me to the latent potency of work, and even now when I write – when I find just the right word, or a sentence snaps into place, when I’m racing toward the ending of a novel – the ecstatic love I felt for you comes back to me. Not always, but sometimes. And when it does, there is nothing in the world like it.”
Ozeki is primarily a novelist, but clearly enjoys exploring the snappier form of the short story. She seems to revel in the freedom to explore an appealing diversity of people and their points of view. She is playful at times, while challenging our preconceptions and subverting common tropes of age, culture and class. The grandmother in “The Problem of the Body,” for instance, makes a surprising connection with a teenage boy she meets through her dating app misadventure, and it feels a little like time travel.
Like taking a journey to varied destinations, The Typing Lady provokes and delights the reader in unpredictable ways which linger long after the initial reading.
David Takami is the author of Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle, numerous essays and online content about Asian American history, and dozens of book reviews published mostly in The Seattle Times. He grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, NY and has lived in Honolulu, Tokyo and Seattle. He now lives in Kenmore, Washington.
